Monday 11 January 2016

Want to Improve Teaching in Universities? Value those who Teach By Sally Hunt

The writing’s on the wall: the increasing use of casual contracts is a threat to teaching quality.
Everyone supports good teaching in our universities. How could we not? UK universities have a global reputation for the high quality of learning offered here – and they attract greater numbers of overseas students (14%) than any other country in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, except the US (which hosts 21%).
Teaching is, at its core, a human endeavour and the fact that so many people want to study in this country is a tribute to the 200,000 staff who teach in our universities, as well as the thousands more who support them. Yet successive initiatives from the government seem to ignore the impact of this critical group, choosing instead to focus upon structures. Sadly, the proposed Teaching Excellence Framework (Tef), continues this pattern.
If the absence of the academic is striking in the Tef proposals, so too is the failure to appreciate how important the underlying employment model pursued by universities is in relation to quality.
More than 100,000 teaching staff (more than half of the total), are in insecure employment. The lucky ones have one-year contracts, tens of thousands more are on hourly paid contracts and 20,000 on some form of zero-hours contract. Thisendemic casualisation, is, in the words of one lecturer I met last week, “higher education’s dirty secret”.
Does it matter that those who teach our children at university are likely to be employed on a term-by-term basis, often living from hand-to-mouth and with little access to facilities or training and professional development?
The truth is that although there are many, many great teachers within the casualised workforce, their achievements are in spite of, rather than because of, the system that employs them. As one lecturer puts it: “The temporary nature of my work means that I lack the time not just to fulfil my academic and pastoral duties with students, but also to develop my own ideas or teaching style.”
The truth is that although there are many, many great teachers within the casualised workforce, their achievements are in spite of, rather than because of, the system that employs them. As one lecturer puts it: “The temporary nature of my work means that I lack the time not just to fulfil my academic and pastoral duties with students, but also to develop my own ideas or teaching style.”
The Tef is being consulted on until 15 January,but the outline for it provided in the green paper proposes using student satisfaction, student retention rates and graduate job prospects to measure teaching quality. Those that score highly in these measures will be allowed to raise tuition fees in line with inflation (which will eventually rise).
There’s a continuing lack of consensus about what constitutes sensible evidence for measuring teaching excellence but the student satisfaction survey is definitely not seen as a credible tool for the job.
There are methodological and pedagogical deficiencies with student satisfaction surveys. A UCU member who is an education lecturer in London told me that she has yet to find anyone who views the NSS as a valid measure of teacher effectiveness.
She pointed out that satisfaction is influenced by a whole host of factors, many of which are wider processes beyond their control, such as funding. Her department is struggling with a much-reduced budget after government reforms shifted teacher training to schools.
The marketisation of higher education has, of course, brought graduate prospects into sharp focus for students – now thought of as consumers. But making a direct link between post-study work and teaching is disingenuous. Choice of course, institution, and sadly, prior schooling and social background, are equally big predictors of job prospects for students.In addition, as an economics lecturer at a south coast university, said, the state of the economy has the biggest bearing on job prospects for her students.
The University College Union has long argued that the conditions teachers work in are effectively the conditions that students learn in. So although it is hidden away on page 33 of the green paper, the suggestion that universities should be held to account for career, staff training and engagement and the numbers of staff in permanent employment is one that we welcome.
As a union, we have made the case for the introduction of clear agreed promotion criteria for teaching staff, based on the national academic role profiles or locally agreed variants of them. Good teaching needs to be recognised in a clear career structure for university staff. I repeatedly hear from members that this is the obvious incentive to improve teaching, supported by appropriate training, support and professional development.

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